Obama’s impotence has intensified questions in Japan and elsewhere about the credibility of the American security umbrella, encouraging nationalists who argue that Tokyo should re-arm in earnest – or even deploy its own nuclear weapons. But their main concern is not North Korea – it is China.

(h/t @jiabaochina)

Chat that Germany is becoming exasperated with the UK negotiating stance over Brexit (link here)...and also with a QE extension inevitable exasperation with the ECB/Mario Draghi is also building (link here). Fun times in Europe...at least the euro is weakish...

(h/t @planmaestro)

Want to guess which is the top overnight visitor destination city? Maybe it might surprise you...

(h/t @tradegovukASEAN)

Apparently we just lived through the hottest summer in recorded history...And possibly the hottest in “thousands of years.” (link here)

With statistics like this and general technological advances just maybe the rise of autonomous cars is inevitable (link here)

The average vehicle is used only 4% of the time and parked
the other 96%

Sector and companies:
Why do companies go bust? Imminently due debt is the biggest reason...

(h/t @NoonSixCap)

Anticipated FY16 S&P 500 earnings growth almost nothing now...although of course the hopes for FY17e are still for double digit growth...

Zero Hedge highlighted the rather firm price/revenue ratio of the S&P 500 constituents...

As Goldman Sachs announce Asian job losses, is it the end of the suitcase banker? "Mainland securities companies occupy seven of the top
10 positions in advising on Hong Kong initial public offerings this year" (link here)

Nice report here on a stock that is in my Financial Orbit Stocks preferred list:

In total, 30 hotel brands now fall under the Marriott
umbrella to create the largest hotel chain in the world with more than 5,800
properties and 1.1 million rooms in more than 110 countries. That's more than 1
out of every 15 hotel rooms around the globe.

Marriott now eclipses Hilton Worldwide's 773,000 rooms and
the 766,000 that are part of the Intercontinental Hotels Group family,
according to STR, a firm that tracks hotel data.

Is Twitter about to be taken over? I do own a few in my pension fund as I love the 'realtime, context rich news':

I also own shares in Carnival which is benefiting from this structural theme...

So why have companies like Next, M&S and Primark had shabby UK clothing retail sales? I liked this in this weekend's Financial Times: